Leaves in the Wind

by A. G. Gardiner

It was so with Carlyle. He raged like a bear with a sore head against the existing political fashion of things, but in the matter of clothes he was a mere antediluvian, and when he wanted a new suit he simply wrote to the little country tailor in far-off Ecclefechan and told him to send another "as before." And so, by taking no thought about the matter, he achieved the distinction in appearance which the people who worry about clothes do not achieve. The flavour of the antique world hung about him like a fragrance, as, but yesterday, it hung about Lord Courtney who looked like a reminiscence of the world of our grandfathers walking our streets to the rebuke of a frivolous generation.

I cannot claim to exhale this fine essence of the past. I am just an ordinary camp-follower of the fashions, too perverse to march with the main army, too timid to ignore it, but just hanging on its skirts as it were, a forlorn relic of the year before last. My taste in ties, I am assured, is execrable. My clothes are lacking in style, and my boots have an unconquerable tendency to shapelessness. I put on whatever is handiest without a thought of artistic design. My pockets bulge with letters and books, and I am constantly reminded by well-meaning people that the top button of my waistcoat is unbuttoned. I am perfectly happy until I come into contact with the really well-dressed man who has arranged himself on a conscious scheme, and looks like a sartorial poem. I lunched with such a man a few days ago. I could not help envying the neat perfection of everything about him, and I know, as his eye wandered to my tie, that there was something there that made him shudder as a harsh discord in music would make me shudder. It may have been the wrong shade; it may have been awry; it may have been anything that it oughtn't to have been. I shall never know.

And it is a great joy to be able not to care. The war has lightened the cloud that hangs over those of us who simply cannot be dressy no matter how much we try. It is no longer an offence to appear a little secondhand. It is almost a virtue. You may wear your oldest clothes and look the whole world in the face and defy its judgments. You may claim that your baggy knees are a sacrifice laid on the altar of patriotism and that the hat of yester-year is another nail in the coffin of the Kaiser. A distinguished Parliamentarian, a man who has sat in Cabinets, boasted to me the other day that he had not bought a suit of clothes since the war began, and I had no difficulty in believing the statement.

That is the sort of example that makes me happy. It gives me the feeling that I am at last really in the fashion—the fashion of old and unconsidered clothes. It is a very comfortable fashion. It saves you worry and it saves you money. I hope it will continue when the war has become a memory. And if we want a literary or historical warrant for it we may go to old Montaigne. When he was a young fellow without means, he says somewhere, he decked himself out in brave apparel to show the world that he was a person of consequence; but when he came to his fortune he went in sober attire and left his estates and his châteaux to speak for him. That is the way of us unfashionable folk. We leave our estates and our châteaux to speak for us.

THE DUEL THAT FAILED

"I think," said my friend, "that the war will end when the Germans know they are beaten. No, that is not quite so banal a prophecy as it seems. Wars do not always end with the knowledge of defeat. They only end with the admission of defeat, which is quite another thing. The Civil War dragged on for a year after the South knew that they were beaten. All that bloodshed in the Wilderness was suffered in the teeth of the incontrovertible fact that it was in vain. But the man or the nation which adopts the philosophy of the bully does not fight when the certainty of victory has changed into the certainty of defeat. I have never known a bully who was not a coward when his back was to the wall. The French are at their best in the hour of defeat. There was nothing so wonderful in the story of Napoleon as that astonishing campaign of 1814, and even in 1870-1 it was the courage of France when all was lost that was the most heroic phase of the war. But the bully collapses when the stimulus of victory has deserted him.

"Let me tell you a story. In 1883, having graduated at Dublin, I went to Heidelberg—alt Heidelberg du feine. You know that jolly city, and the students who swagger along the street, their faces seamed with the scars of old sword cuts. I was one of a group of young fellows from different countries who were studying at the University, and who fraternised in a strange land.

"It was about the time when the safety bicycle was introduced in England, and one of our group, a young Polish nobleman who had a great passion for English things, got a machine sent over to him from London. If not the first, it was certainly one of the first machines of the kind that had appeared in Heidelberg. You may remember how strange it seemed even to the English public when it first came out. We had got accustomed to the old high bicycle, and the 'Safety' looked ridiculous and babyish by comparison.

"Well, in Heidelberg the appearance of the young Pole on his 'Safety' created something like a sensation. The sports of the 'Englander' were held in contempt by the students, and this absurd toy was the last straw. It was the very symbol of the childishness of a nation given over to the sport of babes.